It's been a while since we posted a progress report for the Atlanta Cosplay Meetup's ongoing project, and with Dragon Con right around the corner, we're nearing the finish line. Let's take a look and see what's been going on the last few months!

Thanks everyone who came out! It was a fun event and we're already
talking about next year. You've still got plenty of time to build a bot
for Dragon*Con, Maker Faire, or Chattacon also.

The 12's and 30lb
bots certainly faced the challenge of the post apocalyptic landscape
that is the parking lot behind Freeside. Next year I expect to see some
bots with modifications to handle the uneven surfaces better. Wedges
built for a stage fight didn't fare too well against the cracked
pavement and potholes.

The Atlanta Cosplay Meetup has been making a ton of progress on our Marines & Xenos group costume. We have finished up build day #6 so let's take a look and see where things are at currently!

We've finished principal construction of the Marine torso armor and are working on finishing it currently. The cardboard masters were coated in fiberglass resin to give them strength, and we are going over them with bondo body filler to smooth them out. After a few more passes they should be smooth enough to use as vacuumforming masters, or to mold and cast in resin and fiberglass mat for strength.

We've also started building the leg armor, using the same method as the torso.

All that is left for the Marine armor is to 3D print the shoulder parts, and the helmet and various attachments. Adam purchased the same WWII helmet used in the film, which will become the base for our helmet that we will make out of cast resin and fiberglass mat.

The Pulse Rifle has been assembled and had a first pass of smoothing and cleanup done on it. The entire gun was 3D printed from a high detail model from the game Aliens: Colonial Marines. Another day or so of work and we'll be ready to mold it in silicone!

Adam Keeton lent a hand helping us lathe a test Grenade out of aluminum. This is only a first iteration, we'll need to make a few adjustments and go back and try again. So far the results are very nice looking though!

Plus, he looks like a natural holding the Pulse Rifle.

The Xeno skull has been started. We built the head using a 3D model from the game Aliens: Colonial Marines and a program called 123D Make. What this program can do is generate a 3D interlocking puzzle, sort of
like the wooden dinosaur skeleton puzzles you got as a kid. We can set
it to be however many vertical and horizontal slices and the program
draws up plans, which we then exported to the laser cutter. 4 hours of
cutting and about 60 pieces later, you get this mess.

Assembly really is a simple as finding the numbered slots and sliding
them together. Once you get the first couple of pieces put together the
assembly is a breeze. We took maybe an hour to put the whole thing
together. Once it was assembled, we coated the whole thing in fiberglass
resin to give it strength, and once that cured we filled all of the
holes with expanding foam.

Once the foam cures, we will rasp all of the excess off and skin it in bondo, and use that for our sculpting base.

Valentin is working on the mechanism for the Xeno tongue. We are 3D
designing and printing a rack and pinion gear under tension from a
rubber band, and "cocked" with a worm gear connected to a motor. The
idea is that the Xeno costumers will have a hidden button to open the
mouth and shoot out the tongue via pressure from the band, and the worm
gear will retract and cock the tongue to be shot out again.

Lastly, I started on the Smartgun for my own Marine costume. Every Colonial Marine group needs a Smartgunner, and I would be lying if I didn't say that Vasquez was a bit of a hero as a kid. The Smartgun and the steadicam arm will be built much the way the rest of the build has been, with several 3D printed parts and laser cut cardboard details. The steadicam arm will have a semi-working interior using custom machined aluminum parts and springs. So far the barrel has been cut and printed, with a few more parts on the way.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to our deadline in May!

The Atlanta Cosplay Meetup is a bi-monthly-ish group of cosplayers, prop builders, and costume makers hosted at Freeside Atlanta. We have been meeting since October 2014 to share ideas and projects.

In November we began discussing an idea about making a group costume - something we could all work on, and eventually wear, together - and how we could make that into a reality. After a lot of debate (and a little help for Rachel who had already made her own Xenomorph costume!) we settled on making a Colonial Marines and Xenos group from the Aliens franchise.

We just recently wrapped up our 3rd group build, so let's recap what we've done so far.

Our first build we focused on planning and various ideas of what we wanted to do and how we wanted to get there. We decided to use Pepakura to laser cut cardboard as the rough master for our Marine's armor, and to 3D print some of the detail parts as well as their various weapons.

Pepakura is a program that takes a 3D object and lays it out into 2D faces. The example I like to use for this is creating a a paper craft cube. You can lay out the 6 faces of a cube on a sheet of paper, cut the lines, score and glue tabs, and at the end you have your cube in the real world.

This concept scales up to infinitely complex objects. Cosplayers have been using Pepakura for over 15 years now to create complex suits of armor and props. What I discovered is that Pepakura can export into a format that Freeside's laser cutter can interpret, which turns hours of cutting material into mere minutes.

For our second build, we began laser cutting parts for the Marine torso, starting with the chest. The parts were exported from Pepakura into the laser cutter's software, which was then cut out of cardboard. By dialing in different settings for "cuts" and "scores", we can complete everything in a single job. After about 20 minutes we had all of the pieces cut out and began assembling!

Assembly consists of using hot glue to glue the seams of the cut together. We glue the edges on the inside of the cardboard armor to make sure it keeps it's shape, but this creates big gaps between parts on the front. This won't be a problem for us, since we will be sculpting details and smoothing out the form later on in the project.

For our most recent build, we started applying fiberglass resin to the chest piece. This is used to strengthen the armor so that we can sculpt on it with bondo body filler. While the chest was curing, we began cutting and assembling the back armor. Adam also started 3D printing the Pulse Rifle, which should be ready to clean up and assemble at the next build day.

Rachel also brought her Xeno costume so we could brainstorm ideas on how to create the next version of that. Kevin, our other Xeno, and Rachel and I decided we will cut the Xeno skull out of cardboard stacks for the rough master, which they will harden and sculpt.

Our next build will see a lot of progress, since we are now at a point where we can have teams of people working on different smaller parts. We will cut out and assemble the leg armor, start bondo sculpting on the chest, and fiberglass and bondo the back. We'll also be working on the Pulse Rifle, and may have some of the other Marine weapons to start 3D printing. Our team of Xenos will work on the cardboard jigsaw puzzle.

On Saturday, we had one of our semi regular facility build-outs. These are great for the space and our members as it lets us focus on working on the space itself as a project to improve and maintain Freeside.

This time we did a lot of cleaning up and tidying after some of the major projects at Freeside! Between the JAM build the past few months and the recent power additions, a lot of organization work was needed.

Demontre and Niels put some more time into the indoor paint booth! Not much left on this project now, all we need is the exhaust fans and the filters and we're ready to paint.

Nathan and Paul painted the new folding chairs for the space.

Karen and Adam helped to tidy up the lumber and plastics consumables. Now we can get to scrap lumber and laserable plastics easier!

Everyone pitched in to clean up the center of the workshop and open that space back up. So much room for activities!

Not pictured: Tons of old dead paint that was disposed of, lots of old stuff on the recycling and dead project shelves that was tossed, and of course tons of piles of dust swept up.